I don’t really get what is node editor for? I only know its something to do with the materials but thats it. What is it good for? Any tutorials on how to use node editor?
The high-level concept of the node editor is that the processing that leads up to a finished image is rather like a pipeline and the nodes are a visual representation of that pipeline.
To follow up on sundialsvc4’s comment - nodes give you access to much of the rendering process, so you can control many of the things that happen between modeling that awesome mesh and seeing the final picture. There are 2 kinds of nodes, Material and Compositing.
Material nodes let you go beyond Blender’s basic 16-materials per mesh/10 textures per material limit and “overlay” multiple materials with great flexibility. They are for solving problems like, “I want my outer space squid’s skin to be translucent pink, with opaque green veins under a slimy coating,” but producing the effect in Blender rather than going to postpro in Gimp or Photoshop.
Compositing nodes let you combine scenes and/or pull out aspects of a render (eg shadows, z-buffer, RGB), manipulate them, and recombine them in different ways to get the desired effect. They are for solving problems like the classic combining green-screen live action with CG models. You can also incorporate effects like glow and blur, or tweak the color balance of an entire render, and much more.
Here is a basic tutorial from the Blender wiki. There’s a good reason there are not many tutorials on using nodes. They are not a magic or easy solution to making awesome photorealistic renders or instant space-battle scenes. They are advanced tools that you’ll most likely learn when you need them for specific situations, and mostly by experimentation.
are there anymore tutorials and examples of node been used?
“I want my outer space squid’s skin to be translucent pink, with opaque green veins under a slimy coating,”
This here sounds like a pretty cool tutorial, actually…
Shellfish: Here are two tutorials that made me say aha! about nodes when I worked them out. Broken’s car paint is a good introduction to material nodes. It sets up base paint color, metalflake, and clearcoat. For compositing, look at this tutorial about blue-screen removal. It’s not simple and is a little dated, but has a clear purpose so I liked it.
Blendernation.com and www.cogfilms.com also have some excellent basic tutorials on using nodes.
Bugman: Heh! You could probably do it by modifiying Matt’s car paint material. I’ll give it a shot if I can find a spare hour.
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I believe one of the best starting point for composition nodes is at the Manual/Compositing Nodes wiki page (a lot of the nodes have examples next to them) and the Compositing Tutorials.
Werner